The Life I Chose novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: Her Mother's Plan

I got in and shut the door.

The garage was dim and smelled of oil.

Kendall held the folder against her belly with both arms.

"This morning Mom came to the rental," she said. "She sat on the end of my bed and held my hand and told me how it's going to go."

"How is it going to go?"

"I have the baby in March. I fly back to Lisbon in April. Holt marries a nice girl by summer, and she raises my son as hers." Kendall's voice cracked. "She said I'd get to visit at Christmas. Like an aunt."

"A nice girl," I said.

"It was going to be you."

She opened the folder and put it in my lap.

The top page was a printout of an email from Marjorie's account to Holt's.

It was dated two years ago, in August.

"Darling, people are starting to talk about you and K. Two of the partners' wives saw you two at the Vineyard. Propose to Margo before the end of September. She's ready, and it will end the talk. Love, Mom."

He proposed on September twentieth.

I had cried.

I turned the page.

The next one was from last month, mid-September, the week Kendall came home from Lisbon.

"K. is due in March. Do not tell your father. We can't stop the wedding without a scene, so we postpone it. A year. Margo leaves the restaurant and stays home with K. When the baby comes, he's yours and Margo's. A married couple with a newborn, nobody counts on their fingers. K. goes back to Lisbon. Margo will have no job and no one else, so she won't go anywhere. She'll do it. She's grateful."

I read it twice.

Then I read the last line a third time.

"Grateful," I said.

"There's more."

Kendall reached over and flipped to a page near the back.

A screenshot of a text thread.

Marjorie to Holt, at seven oh one on Friday, October tenth.

Three minutes before he called me from the hospital.

"Say it exactly like this. Calm. Bring her home. Postpone a year. She explains to the hotel and guests. Then the job. Don't let her talk. She'll agree."

I sat in my car and looked at it.

Every line he'd said to me, in order, in his mother's words.

He'd been reading.

His own mother had written my breakup and he'd read it to me off his screen.

"How long has she known?" I said. "About you and Holt?"

"Four years," Kendall said. "She walked in on us. At the lake house. I was twenty-two."

"And she didn't stop it."

"She stopped people finding out." Kendall laughed, horribly. "That's the only thing she's ever stopped."

I looked at her.

She looked back with her chin up and her eyes red.

"Why are you giving me this?"

"Because she's taking my son," she said. "And you're the only person in this whole city who isn't scared of her."

"You staged your collapse at my rehearsal."

"Yes."

"You laughed at me out of his car window."

"Yes."

"I'm not your friend, Kendall."

"I don't need a friend. I need you to do whatever you're going to do to her, and do it loud."

She got out of my car.

She left the folder.

She walked away across the garage with one hand on her back, and didn't look around.

I called Daniel.

"Can I come to you?" I said. "I don't want to be in my house tonight."

His carriage house is in Newport, on a back lane behind a big shingled place he says belongs to a dentist from Connecticut.

It's one room upstairs, one room down.

There's a woodstove, a bed under the eaves, a kitchen the size of a phone booth, and forty-one envelopes in a shoebox on a shelf.

He saw me look at the shoebox.

"Forty," he said. "You've got the forty-first."

"Can I read them?"

"Someday. Not tonight. Some of them are very bad poetry."

"How bad?"

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